no boys allowed in the room!!!!

got my own skates, no big deal

I'm pretty sure that both La Lech and Jenny would have been out of my league in coolness in jr high.

I'm so glad we're (nominally) grown-ups now.

with better haircuts and fashion sense.

Naw, girl. I was generally well-liked and didn't get stuffed in lockers or anything, but I was too poor/fat/smart/non-athletic and then later stoned to be in the popular clique.

i was totally not cool in jr high. for example: remember how i said i went to all girls school? i didn't know a SINGLE BOY from K-7th grade. no cousins, no neighborhood kids, no brothers or friends with brothers, no boys at all. it's difficult to impress how weird this was, but it was true.

in 8th grade, i went to public school. on the first day, in homeroom, these boys whose names started with R or S (hence in my homeroom) descended on me because i was new. i just sat there, terrified. from that moment on, i was not cool. i was weird. i went from being an affable and sort of weird 12 year old to being a totally withdrawn, bored, terrified, antisocial 13 year old. what else did i have to do but listen to records and rollerskate by myself? that doesn't mean i was cool. i was quiet and weird.

Well, if you say so. I probably would have thought you were kind of tough, though. xp to Jenny

if anyone had bothered to get to know me, maybe i would have been kind of cool?

Single-sex schools with no non-school integration makes for a WEIRD LIFE for SURE.

The healthiest person who went to an all-girls school that I know is actually Australian. I think they do it differently there. Also, she got to be in some kind of quasi-military Junior Cadets program in which you actually FIRE WEAPONS and PARACHUTE OUT OF THINGS and get to order around boys of your own age. I can't think of a single thing that would have been more fun at age 14.

went from being an affable and sort of weird 12 year old to being a totally withdrawn, bored, terrified, antisocial 13 year old.

Aww - that was me going from 6th grade to junior high - except I was 11. That was the same time that sabrina and i stopped being friends. I think my one friend in 7th grade was this girl Christina, whose brothers were in a gang, and she admired my stubborn resolve to chew gum in class no matter how many times I got detention for it, because i thought it was a dumb rule.

Here's a question/discussion for you all. I frequently feel like I was more "myself" in early and mid childhood, say ages 8, 9, 10 -- and then went against all my personality traits and instincts for the next decade. For a long time, most of my mental "adulthood", I've felt more like myself at 10 than myself at 20, 21, 22, and maybe even older than that.

Does anyone else agree/identify with the statement that their adult mental/emotional journey is about getting back to being 10? I was a good 10-year-old.

yes! I was talking about this with my mom a few weeks ago! She was talking about how the thing she loved the most when she was 10 was getting to sit in the office of her dad's meat company and play with the 10 key calculator and have all these salt-of-the-earth men around that told dirty jokes and funny stories, and how her current job - which she really likes - is kinda like that.

I feel like, in a lot of ways, my adolescence was a betrayal of my more confident, more practical childhood persona; somehow I knew MORE about the important stuff when I knew less about the world.

Of course I had religion helping me undermine myself, but there's plenty of other things that'll do it for you too.

But yeah - I think there've been a lot of articles about this - focusing on girls - how they're really self-assured and awesome when they're 9-11, and then they start having a lot of the standard problems associated with teenage-ness and become unhappy/insecure.

I have read some articles about studies showing that girls tend to be very confident until they hit puberty, at which point the Patriarchy Oppression Machine really kicks in and girls start to report feeling like shit/hating themselves. XP!!!!

I had some rough childhood years from 7 until about 13, so I definitely don't identify. I think I first really started feeling comfortably like myself when I turned 30.

i was a lot more introverted as a child. even though i'm not the most outgoing person now, i'm like 10000x less socially anxious than i was at age 10. i don't think it helped that i transfered from nerdy montessori school where my weirdness was encouraged to public school in grade 4 and was immediately pegged as a horrible dork.

tbh i like myself better now than at any previous time in my life. it's fun to be nostalgic for old times, but i don't think i'd ever want to relive them.

Ahh! That makes so much sense. Probably in a few minutes either Amanda or horseshoe or Jenny will come along and tell us she did a dissertation on such things and it will all become clear. xp hah!

yeah - my childhood was a bit rough too - i hit puberty pretty early - I think I was 8 or 9, which was kinda traumatic, but it meant that i looked older and was taller than most of the kids in my class, even though i was the youngest. I was a weird kid, but I don't think i had a clue that i was weird, or that it mattered until junior high.

but when i was 10, i liked playing music, and making up stories with my friends, and performing, and reading, and making up lessons and lectures about things - and uh, this isn't all that different from what i do now that i really enjoy.

tbh i like myself better now than at any previous time in my life. it's fun to be nostalgic for old times, but i don't think i'd ever want to relive them.
truth bomb

Well no! I mean, look at how much of what we all thought about was purely aspirational? It was about what we wanted to BECOME, not who we were. Which strikes me as pretty healthy/normal for the younger ages but obv now is better!

Eeeee Sarah I remember being in fifth grade and a couple of boys snatching my purse and threatening to look in "that little zipper pocket" which of course contained a tampon. Gut wrenching terror.

Yeah - it's just working through the baggage of the interim years, and the things that constrained you when you were younger - some of that being the limits of childhood awareness of the world, as well as environmental and family stuff - but recognizing the hope and joy of those years, and a certain authenticity to self - maybe? But of course, it's better being in your 30s, because you have more power over your life.

xp - jenny - i got my period the day before my 10th birthday - and i was having a slumber party at my house.

yikes
i didn't get mine for real til i was 15, but i was built like a mosquito so

Also now if boys try to get into the little pockets of my purse, I just offer them a tampon. Or call the cops, whichever.

Aw, Sarah! That's the pits! I was ten when I got mine. I didn't get my first period at camp, but I went away to camp sometime during my tenth year, and of course had my period, and of course forgot to take a pad out of the pocket of my shorts, which the counselor washed, and then held up as an example to all the other bleeding girls about the importance of checking one's pockets before sending clothes to the laundry.

This is my "favorite" period story. The daughter of our junior high school nurse was in my class. During "The Talk," the nurse was talking about different kinds of pads and tampons and the importance of hygiene during that special time when she suddenly got really adamant and said, "And if you leak, don't just throw your bloody panties in the laundry for your mother to clean up! You wash out your panties yourself!" My classmate, who had obviously failed in this little test of responsible womanhood, likedta died, the poor thing.

holy shit!! that story is great!

oh gosh that poor girl!

TBF I have never thrown my blood panties in the laundry for my mother to clean up, and they say it's all worth it if you get through to just one kid, so...

omg that is one raw story

I watched a movie last night in which an unpopular girl got a (clean) pad stuck to the back of her dress at a party and made fun of, and two of my best adult female friends were saying how they would have been the kind of 15-year-old who did the deed, and I had to say I would have been the 15-year-old who had it done to her. Interesting moment. At some point I became IRL friends mostly with former bullies.

i am irl friends with jenny !!

High five!!!

Late to party as usual (stupid timezones) but I was always weirded out by horsey girls in school.

Me, I was into mermaids. Drew them and wanted to be one. Um.

I went to a mixed primary school and then we moved and I ended up at a single-sex secondary school. Went from being a tomboy with 95% male friends to having pretty much none at all. These were the years when I also realised that I was ugly and nerdy and that this was going to matter. Often wonder if the boys I'd previously been friends with would've stuck around if I'd gone to the same school, and what difference this would've made to my adult psyche.

(Wasn't exactly alone cz I had friends at school, but at parties the boys would not talk to me at all, and my friends would of course go to where the cute guys were, which was generally wherever I was not. Eventually I realised that I hated this and didn't have to do it and ducked out of having much social life outside school.)

I dunno about being more me at any point, but puberty definitely felt like a long series of pummelings to the self-esteem, starting with the first time I ever stopped to ask myself if I was a good person, and reached the answer "probably not, really, no," aged abt 9 or 10.

I feel like being a tomboy, playing with boys' toys, reading books with male protagonists whose maleness is not really spelt out because why would it be, I was in denial about the whole growing up to be a woman thing until that first period. Like, I was just going to be a person who does things and is cool and awesome, and people who do things and are cool and awesome don't happen to be women, according to my view of the world age 7 or so. This is either pretty much universal or a really weird thing to admit, I have no idea which...

i don't know how weird it is - but then i was kinda similar - i was pretty oblivious to gender stuff growing up, being raised on the whole "Free to Be You and Me" thing by liberal parents.

I wasn't really into horses even though I rode from 5-13 or so and had a horse for a while. It was just never really my thing. My real thing was music and I played the violin and piano for years and almost went to music school. I guess I was an orchestra geek when it comes down to it.

I happened to have this pic on FB - that's me on the R and my still v good to this day friend Phoebe on the left. The horse was called Two Eyed Friday.

http://photos-g.ak.fbcdn.net/photos-ak-snc1/v2303/137/25/727781067/n727781067_2530176_3217.jpg

i would have been amusic geek but our schools did not have good music programs so instead i went to reg school half days and arts school half days (there it was acceptable to be a music geek). when i went to music school for college everyone just assumed i went to juilliard bc it was a music school in ny. no one knew that there was anything in ny state outside the city. lol.

Yeah my music talents were trashed because I went to a shitty rural state school with no resources and had piano lessons and nothing pushing/driving me :( Least, thats how I see it. If I really wanted to I could have done better I suppose.

Tza you went to Eastman, right? I almost went there! :)

yep

Guys, when I was a freshman I begged my parents to get me a HS jacket that actually said, instead of a sports team, "orchestra" on the back. Yes, it was that bad. What's worse is that my dad still has the fucking thing and tries to convince me to wear it every single winter. :/

hahaha i did varsity swimming but i did not et the jacket bc lol

Yeah, I know - exactly. I went to an all-girls HS (read: was socially inept), had braces, Sally Jesse Raphael lolhuge glasses, a varsity ORCHESTRA jacket and was fat until I was about 16. I was NAGL. Pretty late bloomer tbh.

tbh i think i just bloomed like 3 years ago.

Does anyone else agree/identify with the statement that their adult mental/emotional journey is about getting back to being 10?

in a lot of ways, i sure do. i can tell it's taken a long time to even start to get away from learning in my early teens to be super cynical, negative, etc., feeling like a complete freak and weirdo, which tends to happen when people say you are that. small towns. high school was the worst! i switched schools, my parents split up, and the few kids i hung out with were messed up in the head & treated each other (and me) pretty horribly. i was prob awful to them too in my own way, and didn't realize. i think everything started to go wrong around 6th-7th grade when i started feeling like i was ugly, had bad glasses, didn't know how to dress. patriarchy oppression machine + catholic church (what's the difference?) it's nice to know other people had some of the same experiences.

wait i thought "since" and "fence" did rhyme!? now that i've tried to say both words about a dozen times, i can tell how they don't rhyme, but i'm pretty sure when i normally say them, they do.

they are completely different vowels!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

not if you say it like "sense". it's supposed to rhyme with "wince" i suppose?